


For Her

by goldenslumber



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-04 22:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/716011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenslumber/pseuds/goldenslumber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jaime and Brienne hide out in a whorehouse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Her

She looks ridiculous in the gaudy sheets of makeup they put on her face. They tried to cover her ruined cheek with creams that resemble vaguely the color of skin. Really, it only messes with the reality of her freckles. Some stand out stronger than others, a leap of sprinkles here and there. The scar on her face is one huge spot of a blush. The stain of pink on her lips makes them wider, almost too wide for her teeth.  
  
All that doesn't matter. Not really.  
  
They do the same to him, put makeup on his eyes and rip away his armor. Brienne had resisted, whereas Jaime assisted the woman with the buckles and laces of a knight's confusing attire. “Come now, wench,” he says when she frowns and recoils from the whore's hands. “Surely you don't think them out for your virtue.”  
  
A younger girl, with poisonous auburn hair grins wickedly. “Speak for yourself, ser. I like myself a woman who can handle a blade.” There is a suggestive spark in those young brown eyes and Brienne is blushing furious beneath the layers of makeup, despite herself.  
  
Jaime laughs, but underneath, he continues to keep tabs on the whore who insists on dressing Brienne. They put her in violet and green and he is in blue. They got it backwards, he thinks, but never says. He is more distracted by the way he feels in a dress. They are displeased when he keeps touching his beard. “There is no time to shave it,” one says, and rips the silk scarf from her neck and pulls it tight around him; she hikes it up passed his nose, leaving only the green eyes and the short lank of golden curls that has begun to grow back visible.  
  
He is not quite so pretty as his twin dressed in woman's clothing, but he looks more woman than Brienne does. No one outright points that out. It is there, though, glaring. Brienne pretends not to notice. She is still uncertain about the whole situation. Jaime is, too. He won't show it, as he is led by two whores on each arm, through the perfumed whorehouse, but the fact that they are being separated unnerves him. He wants to protest. (She does protest.) Neither of them get what they want. “It is easier to hide two ugly whores in a brothel when they aren't in the same bed,” the young woman who led them from the streets in the first instant tells them. They can't argue.  
  
He is immersed in hanging curtains and sheets and incense. The room is dim and sleepy, but he is alert, sitting stiffly next to a woman who is bare breasted and twisting strings into her hair. She smiles lazily at the Kingslayer. “Keep your head down and if anyone comes through, start touching me. They'll turn out.”  
  
“Where is Brienne?” he asks.  
  
“Upstairs with May. We have her, m'lord. You'd best not worry too much a'ver her.”  
  
It soothed him none. He feels pathetic, because he can hear the fighting outside, still. He wants to be out there fighting, too, but knows that he'll only die for his efforts. The stubborn wench won't allow that to happen. Which is stupid, because the men from the brotherhood without banners would come upon the brothel soon enough. They'll search the whole place, top to bottom, turn over every whore not on her back. They will continue to search for him and the wench, even if they happen not to notice them in their disguises. The only way to silence a threat was with a blade. Soon enough, Brienne would need to learn that lesson.  
  
For that time, he sits and begins to help the woman with the strings. The wait is long. His left fingers are useless in the woman's curly brown hair and she ends up just using him to hold the spool the string comes from. He bounces it nervously in his palm. The whole brothel is nervous, tense, filled with an expectation.  
  
“Why?” he asks, when the woman, the mother of the brothel, Miskten, enters the room.  
  
She looks up, her eyes calm. When she'd run into the street and she had wrapped her arms around Brienne's failing shoulders, those eyes had been frantic and urgent. Her words even more so.  _Get up, get up, there is a door, down the alley, you will be safe._  They hadn't asked questions, exhausted and the enemy on their tails, but now he is asking. He is staring at her, earnestly curious.  
  
She smiles dimly. “Not for you.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Her.”  
  
“Brienne?” The question is pointless. There is no other her to mean.  
  
The whore at his side stirs, and touches his hand tenderly when she takes the next length of string. “We admire and envy her.”  
  
“Some don't,” Miskten allows, pulling herself elegantly down on the chair opposite them. She arranges her skirts carefully. “But they love me and they will not betray me. They acknowledge my liking of the brave woman, and they will not resent it.”  
  
Jaime nods, slowly. He thinks he understands. Cersei comes to mind and her wish was always to be a man. Envy, might sound right, for his twin to feel about Brienne, but certainly not admiration. Then again, he knows what it is to admire the wench. He does understand. More than he should.  
  
His voice is muffled by the scarf over his mouth. “She is too stubborn to know that.”  
  
“I know,” Miskten tells him. “She takes our actions as pity.”  
  
“She takes everything wrong.” There is an almost bitterness to that. An arch of an eyebrow from the woman causes Jaime to feel too exposed. Insults burrow to the top of his mind, hundreds. He bites them back. (There is still a measuring of self-preservation in him.) These woman aren't protecting him. Not truly. He is only there because of Brienne. They are protecting him for the wench, not for himself. They must hate him, actually. Men, in general.  
  
(Later he will remember the way Miskten squeezes both Brienne's hands when they depart the brothel and he will wonder if they might of thrown him to the brotherhood if they'd known he was the reason she was in danger, that the men outside were hunting him, mostly, and she was only dragged down by him (a man, no less, the same gender that oppressed them, into the sheets) But the thoughts will be for naught, because the wench never cared about that piece of vital information.)  
  
When the men finally reach the brothel, Miskten treats with them civilly. She is cool and outraged when they demand to look through her employees. The men of the brotherhood are crude, though, they were told by Lady Stoneheart to find the Kingslayer and Maid of Tarth at all costs. What were a couple of whores, if nothing?  
  
Unbidden, Jaime remembers a woman who risked more than one thing to cut down a few of them hanging from a tree, to bury them and treat them respect. That is not what the brotherhood does. They tear the place apart. Jaime cups a breast and the woman at his side uses a hand to clutch his hair and presses his face in her neck and she buries his stump underneath her dress and against her thighs. (She has impeccable composure, kissing his forehead and looking flustered when the men come bursting in. She does not recoil from the feel of his scared missing hand on her delicate skin, does not flinch at anything, holds strong and looks abash when needed.) They are overlooked for two overzealous friends. Jaime breathes easy once the doors slam shut behind them.  
  
Upstairs, he hears the footsteps, the voices. There is nothing he can do but sit and stare at the wall. He devotes to memory where they stashed his and Brienne's swords. (Under a few floorboards in the main room.) They won't die without a fight. After all they've been through, he will not allow that. When there is the well of a girl's scream, he jerks into motion, but the woman beside him clings to his skirts and rips him back down. “No,” she hisses. “That was Jenica. She is five. It was nothing, only her fright. Your Lady is fine.”  
  
 _My lady,_  Jaime thinks and feels restless.  
  
Miskten comes down first, to inform them that the brotherhood is gone, back on the streets. It will be hours yet until they clear out of the surrounding area, but still, she refuses for Jaime to see Brienne. The one with strings in her hair stays for only a little, but going and another woman takes her place (this one only sits in the middle of the cot provided and hums and traces a tattoo on her arm, utterly ignoring the Kingslayer). Hours later she is replaced by the girl with the auburn hair, whose name turns up to be, in fact, May.  
  
Jaime presses her for information. “She's sleep'in,” May tells him, offhandedly. That isn't enough, of course. She looks annoyed at his persistence and adds, "Francis resettled her broken arm 'while back, the whole thing made her tired." After a few moments, the girl sits up, huffing, and examines Jaime's face. (He does the same back. He meets her gaze, unwavering, and wonders how a woman who is barely seven-and-ten ends up here.) “Why?" she asks him, spitting out the words in a unmistakably Northern accent. "Miss her?”  
  
“That's certainly not the way I would put it.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
Jaime narrows his eyes. “Good?”  
  
“She deserves better.”  
  
May leaves when the five year old Jenica comes calling at the door, black ringlets tangled around a squashed little face. No one returns to keep him company after that. He is left in a room that smells too much like smoke and heat and stale sex. The makeup has started to agitate and itch and he wipes it away with the dress. (He does not trust the sheets or pillows to be clean enough to touch his face.) Smudges remain and he licks his thumb and scrubs and scrubs until the skin around his eyes is raw. Raw enough to look as though he were crying.  
  
There is no food brought to him. He catches one or two pairs of feet scurrying near his door. Eyes gleam in the shadows at the crack, but he can't make out faces. They always run off, tittering. He paces for a while, but his bones are so exhausted from running her gives in to sitting in the cushioned chair and rests. If the wench is sleeping, he should, too. Only it seems the moment he gets comfortable, footsteps enter the room. (Though, really, hours have passed.)  
  
“You're leaving,” Miskten tells him, turns around and expects him to follow.  
  
In the main room Brienne is dressed again, in her armor. Properly herself, again. The makeup is cleaned off, her hair damp from bathing and she is looking much better than she has the whole time he's been with her. She looks a lot better than Jaime, himself, feels. He dresses himself in his own armor, feeling awkward in the room, instead of assured and amused as he was when they'd stripped him of it. (It is a new thing, to feel ungainly in a crowd of women, his left hand slowing the process too much, and Brienne sitting in a bench only a few yards away.)  
  
Both of them are fed with overripe, tangy peaches and hard as rock bread, buttered in clumped pig grease.  
  
Brienne tries to pay them. She is refused, but the wench leaves the dragons on the table anyway. Jaime urges her to keep the coin, if only for a moment, and that earns him multiple dark looks from the women. (He had only thought they would need it more, since Miskten refused the money anyway, and the women would possibly link the paying them for their hospitality familiar in a not so kind way.)  
  
Physically, they leave with nothing they hadn't entered the brothel possessing. There are no provisions or horses or coats for extra warmth to give the two traveling knights. But Jaime is sure that he does not miss the kiss May presses into Brienne's jaw and he does not miss the seemingly lighter load of burdens on those wide shoulders. Brienne is still stressed, knows that the brotherhood are only a day away and they have only just narrowly escaped.. but, for both, a little, it is reassuring, to know that humanity is not lost. That they are not abandoned to their oath-breaking world all on their own, running without friends, just each other. In fact, Jaime leaves with an impression that perhaps he is not the only one who has noticed how astonishing the wench's eyes can be.  
  
Allies can come from unlikely places, he supposes, in the end. Not that he'll ever go looking for them. (He never looked for handouts before. Why start now?) There are only two things he trusts. His sword; a blade of steel, that has no will, but always the potential to take a man's life (whether his own or anothers). And the other, his wench. Who he may not deserve, (and certainly does not deserve the respect, liking, and protection from her) but that he trusts. Will always trust.


End file.
